"No, I'm from Iowa, I only work in outer space."

by space at 11:37 PM on September 25, 2002

I've picked up a new leisure time activity lately: job-hunting. Some of you may be familiar with it: you compete with other people for duties and responsibilities with various companies, vying for insufficient compensation for the loss of your days in the prime of your life and the sacrifice of your identity to corporate ideology. You have only your self-worth to lose!

It's quite the challenge. First, you have to write a resume making it look like you haven't spent the last two years of your life getting paid to read sites not unlike this one and bitching about staplers. Then, you have to write a cover letter further obscuring that fact, leaving out any information that may detract from your desirability and filling 3-4 paragraphs with such inflationary bombast that you briefly convince yourself that you're qualified for the job. Then you mail all this off and follow it up with a series of increasingly desparate phone calls to hiring managers, Human Resources types, and finally, disconnected phone lines.

Sounds almost too simple, doesn't it? You're asking yourself (because I can't hear you, I'm not there. I don't know who you're talking to, but stop. Stop it and read this, dammit! I'm trying to tell you something), you're asking yourself "Aren't there more rules than that?" Sure there are! Only I'm not going to tell you what they are, and neither is anybody else. You'll figure out some of them as you go, but largely you'll have no idea why you aren't even getting phone interviews for jobs that are one step above (or below!) a secretarial position. One rule I recently learned is to keep my address off my resume. I'm trying to move to another city, and my unstylish out-of-town digs are directing my most heartfelt aspirations to some HR mouthbreather's circular file. In fact, the only people that I've actually heard back from believed that my town was a suburb of Chicago, when it's actually one hundred and eighty miles away.

Anyway, I get the feeling that I'm going to have some pretty elaborate fictions to keep track of by the time I'm done. My "Management experience" is watching "Starship Troopers" and stealing candy at a video store with three other criminial teenagers after my boss had a medical emergency and left the place in our hands for two months. My "Emergency Experience" is laughing at a girl who was choking on a Life Saver and breathing through that little hole in the center. And Rock Island? It's just north of Lake Forest.

I'm starting to get creative, though. Tonight, while mentally practicing for a phantom telephone interview, I decided that my "greatest weakness" was that "I get really drowsy after a big meal." When I discovered the other day that a certain premier web career site had strangely deleted my entire resume excepting my name and address, I briefly considered leaving it as it was. Wouldn't you be intrigued by someone confident enough to give you a resume with only his name and address on it? "That should be enough. If you want to see my qualifications, come to my house." That was before I knew about the out-of-town address foul, though. Now it just has my name, in a large, sans-serif font. If they want me, they'll find me.

And if not, well, it's only a hobby. I can always go back to weblogging when I get sick of this job nonsense.